After three days of testimony, it took jurors only 20 minutes to determine
that Kim Bean killed Carol Foreman in her Bradenton Beach home last February.

Bean, 46, also of Bradenton Beach,
was convicted of second-degree murder. Judge Ed Nicholas sentenced him
to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

"What you did was horrible
and inhumane," Nicholas said. "Mr. Bean, I hope your live
a long, long life, and I hope you think about the fact of your taking
Carol Foreman's life every day of your long life."

Assistant State Attorney Brian
Iten provided expert testimony and forensic data to prove that Bean struck
Foreman, 56, with an unopened wine bottle and then kicked her in the
face and head after a dispute over crack cocaine.

But perhaps the most damning evidence
against Bean was his own words, recorded on a taped interview with Bradenton
Beach Police Det. Sgt. Lenard Diaz and Detective Mark Holden of the Manatee
County Sheriff's Office, in which Bean confessed to killing Foreman.

Jurors were unswayed by Assistant
Public Defender Peter Belmont's argument that Foreman had approached
Bean with the wine bottle and threatened him after he helped himself
to some of her crack. Belmont said Bean was defending himself when he
took the bottle from her and, when she continued to threaten him, struck
her using "justifiable force" to contain her.

Bean has 30 days to appeal the
sentence.

The tape

Foreman, a cook at the Bridge Street
Pier and Cafe, was found by ex-boyfriend Clifford Wayne Stine shortly
after 9 a.m. Feb. 4. He went to her home on Third Street North to drive
her to his sister's house, where Foreman was to do some housework
as partial repayment for $750 a few days earlier.

Stine called police when he discovered
her body.

Police quickly determined foul
play was involved in her death and called forensic experts and the medical
examiner's office. Preliminary examination indicated that Foreman
had been struck on the head, and an unusual pattern of odd-shaped ridges
was evident on her face.

Diaz and others began interviewing
neighbors and friends of Foreman's, interviews that eventually
led to Bean's apartment on Second Street.

Bean's girlfriend took a
note from Diaz asking Bean to call him when the commercial fisherman
returned home. Bean called Diaz at 3 a.m. Feb. 5, and an interview was
arranged.

Diaz decided to pick Bean up early
at his home for the interview at the police station. As they were leaving,
Diaz asked what shoes Bean was wearing the previous days and, with Bean's
permission, took them as evidence. The shoes had a distinctive ripple
pattern on the soles.

The interview with Bean lasted
almost four hours.

Yes, he and Foreman were friends,
Bean said. He had gone to her house and they had smoked crack cocaine.
There was another man there, a man named Tyler, and there was a black
man with dreadlocks who Bean thought was the drug dealer who had delivered
the crack. He had left earlier, driven off in a white car. There was
another man, also black with dreadlocks, in the car. He must have come
back later, after he left, and killed her, Bean said.

After more than three hours of
back-and-forth, the following was recorded on the tape.

"Please don't arrest
me," Bean said on tape. "It's some other guy. Give
me a couple days. I don't want to go to jail."

Diaz: "You ran from your
dead friend's body, and your footprints are on her face. You say
it's some other guy, but I think you're just trying to cover
your ass here."

Holden: "Why don't
you give this some closure. Why waste everybody's time and tons
and tons of money when you know what's going to happen. You know
this mysterious person is a lie."

Diaz: Let's finish it. Finish
it the right way. Finish it with the truth."

Bean: "I sat with Carol at
the table, smoking. I took the crack pipe, and she said, ‘Put that
back!' I went to light it, and she came at me with a wine bottle.
She said, "You can't do that, put my [stuff] down.' I
grabbed the bottle and hit her, and she fell down. She grabbed my leg
and tried to bite me, and I kicked her once, and I left.

"I'm so scared.

"I was raised to be good.
I was supposed to be able to make it, succeed, have respect. I wasn't
supposed to be running around in the middle of the night getting crack."

Diaz and Holden asked where the
wine bottle was, and Bean said it was in his backpack along with her
purse back at his apartment. The backpack contained an unopened bottle
of white wine, a purse with blood on it, and a bottle of prescription
pills that were later identified as belonging to Foreman's ex-boyfriend.
Several of the pills were found in the blood around her body by forensic
technicians.

None of the money Foreman had just
received was ever found.

The medical examiner

Dr. Russell Vega is the chief medical
examiner for the 12th District of Florida, which includes Manatee County.
He arrived on the scene at 2 p.m. Feb. 4.

He said during his testimony he
observed blood throughout the kitchen and dining room area and determined
that there was some injury to Foreman that took place while she was either
sitting or standing by the table, and that she sustained other injuries
while she was on the floor. He also noticed the yellow tablets in the
blood by Foreman's head.

He estimated the time of death
to have been approximately 12 hours earlier.

He conducted an autopsy the next
day. Vega's conclusion was that Foreman had sustained at least
four separate blows to the left side of her face, two to her forehead,
and one to the back of her head, which he said would be consistent with
her head hitting a hard surface, such as a table edge or the linoleum
floor of the apartment.

Some of the blows did not look
like they could have come from a fist, he added, but would be consistent
with an impact with a wine bottle. The patterns left on her face did
look like the print from the sole of a shoe, and Vega said he did observe
Bean's shoes and said the pattern appeared to match.

Foreman had trace amounts of cocaine
and alcohol in her blood and urine, he said.

Vega concluded Foreman also had
a subdural hemotoma - a blood clot - in her brain that caused
her death. He said the official cause of death was blunt-impact head
injury and subdural hemotoma.

The arguments

Prosecutor Iten's closing
remarks to the jury stressed the intensity of the attack by Bean against
Foreman. He reminded the jury that she had been struck at least six times, "three
times a shoe hit her face when she was already on the floor, she a 133-pound
woman, 5'6" tall, 56 years old. Where was the threat? He
had already disarmed her when he took the bottle and struck her, then
when she tried to bite him, he kicked her."

He said that Bean had ATM receipts
in his backpack indicating he tried to withdraw money late in the afternoon
but was denied on both occasions.

He said the wine bottle was found
in Bean's backpack, along with the bloody purse and the blood and
DNA on Bean's shoes matched that of Forman.

He speculated that the pills spilled
out of the purse onto the floor while Bean and Foreman were fighting
over it.

Bean, Iten said, "was indifferent
to human life, to leave his friend there on the floor with a concussion,
dying but not dead."

On Bean's behalf, Belmont
said that there was "no doubt that a tragedy occurred last year
in the life of Carol Foreman. It started out as a night among friends,
and it ended up as a tragedy that tangled up with drugs and a tragic
death and, 36 hours later, having Kim Bean tell what happened."

He said the law on second-degree
murder was complicated, and stressed the element of the law that calls
for the jury to determine without reasonable doubt that the death was
caused by the acts of "a depraved mind."

He said there were several elements
of the case that police and others failed to follow up on - no
attempt was made to find the drug dealers, other people at Foreman's
apartment during the evening were briefly interviewed, and a tip that
one of the people present that night had been spending more money that
usual had been dropped.

He said that Bean did take the
life of Foreman, but he should not be charged with second-degree murder.

He argued that he acted in self
defense, and urged jurors to weigh the elements of justifiable force
in Bean's defending himself against Foreman.

The verdict

The six-member jury deliberated
for 20 minutes before rendering a verdict of guilty to second-degree
murder to Bean in the death of Foreman. Judge Nicholas sentenced him
to life in prison without parole.

He has 30 days to appeal the verdict
and sentencing.

The Bean murder trial is the first
murder conviction in Bradenton Beach history.

Get breaking news

Sign up to receive breaking news alerts
via e-mail. We'll send you a notice when the news and classifieds
appear online every week, before the print edition hits the streets.